Here are our 20 favorite free tools to help you kick more ass in life:
- Alfred: A productivity application for Mac OS X
- Launchy: A productivity application for for Windows.
- Honey: A chrome extension to save time and money shopping online.
- CloudApp: A Mac App to easily share images, links, music, videos and files.
- Currently: Chrome Extension to replace new tab screen with current time and weather.
- Rapportive: Gmail plugin that shows you everything about your contacts right inside your inbox.
- DownThemAll: Download manager/accelerator extension for Mozilla Firefox
- Prismatic: Awesome newsfeed app for web and iPhone.
- Reddit Enhancement Suite: The best way to stay in control of your reddit experience.
- Facebook Unseen: Hide when you've seen your friend's Facebook messages.
- Moves: Activity Tracker for iPhone and Android.
- Sequel Pro: Easy-to-use Mac database management application
- Instapaper: Tool for saving web pages to read later on your iPhone, iPad, Android, computer, or Kindle.
- Pocket: Put articles, videos or pretty much anything into Pocket.
- Glympse: Easiest way to safely share your location with someone in real time.
- Calibre: Comprehensive e-book software.
- Send To Kindle: Chrome/Safari extension to sending web content to your Kindle.
- LastPass: Online password manager and form filler that makes web browsing easier and more secure.
- Synergy: Mouse and keyboard sharing software.
- TeamViewer: Remote control any computer over the internet.
And check out these bonus free tools recommended by other sumo-lings:
- HelloSign: Legally Binding Electronic Signatures
- MightyText: Text from your computer, sync'd with your Android phone & number.
- Trello: Web organizational tool that keeps track of everything, from the big picture to the minute details.
- Streak: CRM in your Gmail inbox.
Alfred is an amazing productivity tool if you use a Mac.
Here are 4 tips on how to use it:
- Contacts: Type in name of a person you want and then hit enter, you get quick access to any of their information.
- Find: Look for any file you are trying to find. The quickest way I've found on my Mac.
- Open or (') will actually open any file you want on your computer.
- Calculator. Type in any math operation and hit enter to save it to your clipboard. Then you can Command + V to paste it anywhere.
If you’re looking for an Alfred alternative on a Windows machine, try out Launchy. Launchy’s features include:
- Launching applications and files
- Killing tasks
- Performing calculator operations
- Running command prompt commands
- Plugins that can interact with todo list apps and more.
Shop online and want to save money? Use Honey.
Honey is a Google Chrome and Firefox extension that finds coupon codes when you're shopping online. It works with over 100 sites including Amazon, Best Buy, CVS, Gap, Macy's, NewEgg and a ton others.
Honey crawls the web for coupon codes and tries them for you automatically right as you're about to check out.
CloudApp is the most convenient way to share screenshots for Mac users.
Make sure to select Autoupload Screenshots and choose default keys for Upload clipboard content. A good one to choose is: Command + Shift + A. Then you can hit 3 (full-screen) or 4 (drag to screen you want copied). Now you have any screen shot ready for you to paste (Ctrl + v) at ease.
Currently is a beautiful Google Chrome extension that replaces your new tab screen with the current time and weather.
Rapportive is a Gmail plug-in that shows you everything about your contacts right inside your inbox.
You can use it to find ANYONE'S email address in less than a minute. Here's a video showing you how:
DownThemAll is a download manager extension for Firefox. Imagine the scenario: Anton sends you a link to an album that has pictures of him and Kendrick Lamar hanging out in the AppSumo office. You think this is awesome so you want to download all the images to your computer.
Instead of right-clicking each image and downloading them individually, you can:
- Right-click the site and click DownThemAll
- Filter by ‘image’ files.
- Filter further by filename.
- Hit Start
DownThemAll will then download all images on the site that contain your filters. Additionally, you can set how many files to download at once and the amount of bandwidth to allocate to the download so you don’t slow down the network for everyone else.
Prismatic is a great tool for staying on top of topics that matter to you. It automatically pulls feeds from all over the web based on topics you care about. Then as you use it’s constantly getting more interesting because it learns what you like, finding more for you, and removing what you don’t.
Here are 3 tips on how to use it:
- Start off with high level topics you like, for example Chad wants to stay up to date on “programming” so he started with that. Once you start reading and find articles you like drill deeper by subscribing to the sub-topics of those articles. Chad's more interested in “Node.JS” so as I read programming articles about that I was able to now see more Node.JS specific ones.
- Use the bookmark icon to save articles you want to read or reference later.
- Because it’s constantly adjusting to what you like, it can easily become addicting, limit your reading time daily to make sure you get up and take action on what you learned rather than just learning for the sake of learning.
Reddit Enhancement Suite is the best way to browse Reddit.
It has some super awesome features like:
- Inline Image Viewer: Opens images inline in your browser with the click of a button. Which means you don't have to leave Reddit to view a photo/video.
- Never Ending Reddit: Gives you a never ending stream of reddit goodness. Just keep scrolling down and content loads automatically!
- Comment Navigator: Provides a comment navigation tool to easily find comments by OP, mod, etc.
- Subreddit Manager- Allows you to customize the top bar with your own subreddit shortcuts, including dropdown menus of multi-reddits and more.
If you're an avid Redditor, you need to be using Reddit Enhancement Suite.
Facebook Unseen is a Google Chrome extension that blocks Facebook's read receipts from being sent.
If you don't want to have your friends knowing when or if you've read their messages, Facebook Unseen is the perfect extension to block those pesky read receipts.
Which means that ex-gf that keeps bothering you won't know you've read her messages :-P
Pro tip: If you first view the message on your phone, a read receipt will be sent. Facebook Unseen only works when you read messages on your computer on Chrome.
Free is for me. A favorite saying in my family. I have worn Fitbits to help track my steps but always lost them or found them inconvenient. Pedometers are super useful in encouraging you to get out and walk. Even just the idea of them motivates me to get off my ass and walk around if I’ve been at my computer all day. I love the Moves app because it’s always on, can track when I’m biking vs walking and it does it all seemlessly.-Chief Sumo Noah Kagan
Sequel Pro turns any business monkey into a pseudo developer. The real greatness of this tool is being able to pull information from a MySql database WITHOUT bugging your developers. Instead of writing queries you can look at any table and with content view browse your database like you do with Excel. I use this all the time to see the sources my visitors came from, revenue / profit from different ad spending and look at cohort analytics to see how members of Monthly1k.com are progressing by month.-Chief Sumo Noah Kagan
This is a great service you never knew you needed until it was around. Instead of getting distracted with articles while at work or annoyed by too many ads, you can click the “read later” in your Booksmark Bar and it saves it to instapaper. You can then conveniently read the article at your own time on pretty much any device.
As an alternative to InstaPaper, Pocket lets you download a web page exactly as it looks and functions. If you want to read an article or watch a video but don’t have time, hit the Pocket button on your browser and the article will be cached and can be viewed later even without an internet connection.
Glympse is the best way to safely share your location while you're driving.
Here's exactly how it works:
If you read a lot of ebooks, Calibre is a life-saver. Whether downloading books from the library’s digital collection, Amazon, Google Play Books or wherever, you can throw them all into this ebook manager. From it, you can convert the ebook to different formats, send the book directly to any device you own (Kindle, Nexus 7, iPad, etc), and even retrieve RSS feeds for later viewing on your device.
Pro-tip: If you’re a student, put your class notes in Calibre and convert them to a format readable by your eReader.
Send to Kindle is a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that lets you send any web page you’re currently reading to your Kindle so that you can read it later. This is really useful for really long articles that you’d prefer to read distraction-free or from an e-ink display rather than your computer monitor.
Managing passwords becomes unwieldy when each site has different criteria for what a good password constitutes. Some have character minimums or maximums, capitalization rules, or symbol/number requirements.
Rather than trying to remember them all or using your browser’s less-than-secure “Remember this Password” feature, check out LastPass. Instead of remembering several passwords, you just have to remember a single password for LastPass.
Pro Tip: Use LastPass’ Secure Notes feature to save passwords that aren’t tied to a specific website like your Bitcoin wallet.
Synergy is awesome because it makes multi-platform development much more efficient. If you find yourself using Windows and Mac OS X frequently at the same time this is a life saver. It lets you share your mouse and keyboard between multiple machines without having to install any additional hardware.
Tips:
- Configure Windows’ Hot Keys to the Mac OS X equivalent or vice versus to ease frustration of using two operating systems at the same time.
- Take advantage of the ability to copy & paste between machines so that you don’t have to email or file sync, this is a huge time saver.
- We’ve noticed that if two team members are using it on the same network you may experience some weird behavior, make sure you both use different port settings to avoid this.
Teamviewer lets you take control of another one of your computers over the internet. With it, you can take your laptop with you and still access all the files and programs that are on your desktop at home. This can really come in handy if you work on multiple computers and have your files spread out. Although you can use a VNC to set up remote computer access, TeamViewer makes it easy by removing firewall issues or dynamic IP address issues and letting you use a simple login and password.
Tips:
- If anybody’s ever asked you for computer help over the phone, you know how difficult it can be to know what the other person is seeing. Have them install TeamViewer QuickSupport and you can view or take over their computer.
- Retrieve and send files from other computers even if you’re at work and the computer that you need access to is at home.
HelloSign allows you to sign legally-binding documents with confidence!
MightyText lets you send & receive SMS and MMS from your computer or tablet, using your current Android phone number. Messages stay in sync with your phone's SMS inbox.
Trello is the fastest, easiest way to organize anything, from your day-to-day work, to a favorite side project, to your greatest life plans.
Stream is a Chrome extension that lets you manage your customers in Gmail.
